Vectorizing a Logo From an Image

This tutorial describes in detail how to recreate
a logo from a small GIF image that will be suitable
to be used in a desktop publishing layout program such
as QuarkXPress® or Adobe® InDesign®. It
sometimes occurs that a company will not have their
logo in vector format. Whether it gets lost or was
never delivered in vector format (even though it may
have originally been drawn in a vector program) or
for whatever reason, you may be called upon to recreate
it even from as little as a scan of a printed piece.

I wish to thank the Eco-Life Foundation for allowing
permission to use their logo in this example. In this
tutorial you will utilize a number of software applications
together to achieve the desired result. In this tutorial
I used :

Adobe® Photoshop® CS
Adobe® Streamline®
Macromedia® FreeHand® MX 2004

If you prefer, you could use Adobe® Illustrator® instead
of FreeHand as the illustration program.

QuickTime® Movies

This tutorial employs QuickTime® movies to help
demonstrate how to do the various steps. You will need
the QuckTime plugin for your browser. If you don't
already have it, you can download it free from the
Apple® website here.
Your monitor should be setup with a screen reslution
of at least 1024 x 768 pixels for best viewing. When
you click a link to one of the QuickTime movies, it
will stream to your computer and start playing automatically.
The movies will play with a control bar with VCR controls.
You can pause and replay the movie with these controls
if you want. If it takes a little extra time to start,
then the movie is just streaming enough to your drive
to play without interruption. It is simply adjusting
to the speed of your connection or network conditions
at the time. Just be patient, it will start. The movies
were recorded on a Macintosh® so
I used Macintosh commands in the narratives. Windows® users
please see the translations for these commands at the
tutorial steps that show the movies.

Snap To Guides and Snap To Point

In Photoshop® and FreeHand® make sure that "Snap
To Guides" is setup. In Photoshop click View > Snap
To > Guides. In FreeHand click View > Guides > Snap
To Guides. Also in FreeHand, click View > Snap
To Point to make sure "Snap To Point" is
also enabled.

The Strategy

This is a 2-color logo. The strategy is to first
separate the 2 colors into individual shapes that we
can trace with Adobe® Streamline® which converts
raster images into vector art, then use Adobe® FreeHand® or
Illustrator® to clean up the converted vector art
to make an EPS file that is suitable for print layouts.

With this logo, the easiest approach to take is to
select only the orange areas when separating the two
colors because the orange areas are the easiest to
isolate. We will first select the orange areas, then
invert the selection so everything except the orange
is copied. This will isolate the green color. Then
we will select the orange areas directly and copy only
these for the second color.